How to: magically increase employee productivity
Increase productivity, reduce employee turnover and attract the right talent to your business.
Are you in on the secret that’s thought to magically increase employee productivity by as much as 20%? Not only that, but it drastically reduces staff turnover too. Oh, and not to forget the fact that it makes your business so much more attractive to talented new employees…
OK, maybe it’s not as hush-hush as we’re making out. We’re talking about happiness in the workplace. It’s something that’s becoming more and more important to businesses as the evidence mounts for just how effective happy workers are. According to a study conducted by the Social Market Foundation (‘Happiness and productivity: Understanding the happy-productive worker’) happiness and productivity are very closely linked. In fact, this is the study responsible for the 20% increase in productivity stat we mentioned above.
Now, that’s all well and good but how do we go about defining this business-boosting happiness that more and more organisations are beginning to swear by? Business management specialist Patrick Lencioni has some thoughts on the matter in his book ‘The Truth About Employee Engagement’ (2016). He defines happiness in the workplace in three elements:
- Feeling like who you are matters
- Feeling like what you do makes a difference
- Feeling like you’re making personal progress and doing work that’s benefitting your organisation
Every business has a different culture so how you implement those things will naturally vary. The general happiness of one company might thrive on x, the other on y. For us, we have a few different ways of keeping our team smiling and motivated to go out there and do their best work.
Our Culture Team is the first example that comes to mind. They organise a whole range of regular activities that anyone in the company can get involved with. That could be anything from charity bake sales (any excuse for cake is good by us) to foodbank drives or even an end of year raffle. Last year they even organised a Jacob’s Cream Cracker Challenge – hilarity quickly ensued. We even had some of our connections take on the challenge themselves after we posted about it on our social channels. All in the name of good fun!
In September, we even ran our first ever Wellbeing Month. Each week we focused on a different topic (healthy body, healthy mind, food, exercise and winter health) with the goal of promoting a better way of life at a time of year that self-care can be difficult. The feedback we got on this was great – and team certainly seemed to appreciate this focus.
True to Patrick Lencioni’s happiness list that we mentioned earlier, we also like to give credit where credit’s due to team members who are going above and beyond the ordinary in their role. We like to think of it as a cycle of happiness: happier people work harder, that hard work gets acknowledged and rewarded, those happy people get a boost and carry on with the good work. Remember, success doesn’t bring happiness; happiness brings success.
For us, yes, all these things are driven with the goal of creating a better business offering and growing Streamline but it’s also about creating a pleasant environment for those 40+ hours a week we spend doing our jobs. If all this sounds right up your street, why not follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with all our current vacancies? Or check out our Careers page.